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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/27790795">Boost at Periapsis</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/ENOPANGOLIN/pseuds/ENOPANGOLIN'>ENOPANGOLIN</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Love Live! School Idol Project</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Alternate Universe, Gen, Mecha</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-11-30</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-11-30</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-10 14:34:06</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>General Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>2,322</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/27790795</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/ENOPANGOLIN/pseuds/ENOPANGOLIN</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Hundreds of years in the future, on the intergalactic colony ship <i>Uranohoshi</i>, Honoka Kosaka applies to join the School Idol Research Club.</p><p>(<i>LL:SIP</i>, but mecha! in! space!)</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>4</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Boost at Periapsis</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>2025: Ohara Medium Industries introduces the world's first truly general-purpose anthropomorphic work frame.<br/>
2030: The accelerating pace of frame adoption across industries worldwide begins to displace large fractions of the human workforce.<br/>
2038-40: Frame-driven unemployment and the resulting unrest drive global society to near breakdown.<br/>
2040-7: The Water Wars roil the globe.<br/>
2073: Event Y.<br/>
2076: The exhausted nations of the world turn their eyes to the heavens. The first generation ship, the ISM <i>Ultima Ratio</i>, is launched in the blind hope of salvation beyond Earth's bonds. Given societal conditions and the need to minimize payload weight, the populations of the generation ships are supermajority female.<br/>
2079: The DNF <i>Uranohoshi</i>, the 35th generation ship, is launched.<br/>
2083: The 78th and final generation ship is launched. The <i>Ultima Ratio</i> accelerates past Saturn.<br/>
2087: The generation ship fleet receives its last transmission from Earth, a weather report from Adelaide.</p>
<hr/><p>
  <i> Many years and AU later </i>
</p><p>2X04: With no star systems in easy reach, the leaders of the generation ship fleet decide to cease acceleration and establish a permanent colony in the interstellar void.<br/>
2X16: The fleet completes the conversion of all 65 surviving generation ships into stations in mutually interlocked orbits. The erstwhile colonists, now in consistent and sustained communication and periodic physical contact with each other for the first time, begin forging a unified society.<br/>
2X18: The ZPM <i>Hatsun</i> launches the first interstation raid, sending a detachment of armed frames to seize a habitation unit from the DNF <i>Tokugawa</i>.<br/>
2X20-25: The Violent Years.<br/>
2X25: The Hatsun Peace Accords require all frames to be demilitarized and used for peaceful purposes only.<br/>
2X26: Three stations organize the first Love Live, a demonstration of peace and love conveyed through elaborate audiovisual performances in repurposed raiding frames.</p>
<hr/><p>
  <i> Fewer years and mere billions of km later </i>
</p><p>Your name is Yazawa Nico and school idols are very important to you. You're a fan, of course, but you're not going to just be a fan — you want to <i>be</i> a school idol. You want to be a cute star burning blindingly bright with hopes and dreams against the inky void. And of course the first step to becoming a school idol is to learn everything you can. Know thyself, know thy enemy, know victory and the already-existing school idols aren't your enemy but they aren't aren't your enemies. You don't want to just be a school idol; you want to be the very best school idol and that means surpassing all the others. They're the rivals you're going to leave behind as you carve your name into Love Live history, whether or not they know it yet, and to make that happen you'll need to learn all their tricks so you can go one better.</p><p>Space is tight on the Uranohoshi, as it is on every station, but a day of feverish exploring a year ago paid off when you discovered a small and little-used maintenance hangar with not just one but three free bays. You'd immediately claimed one as your own and begun expanding your collection of school idol research materials. (Technically, the bay and the collection belong to the club, not you personally, but you are the club president.) You spend almost all your free time there, admiring the frames in the adjacent bays between deep dives into ever more esoteric aspects of idoldom and the Love Live system. They're all drab practical work frames, nothing like the flamboyant customs idols pilot, their proximity a constant reminder of how close and yet how far you are from your dream.</p><p>And so when she bursts into the hangar you're floating neck-deep in several sheaves of tablets, analyzing the evolution in laser light displays over the most recent Love Lives. (At least that's what you were doing before you started thinking about how cool it would be to 'borrow' a mining laser and carve a kilometer-long smile into a passing asteroid during a performance.)</p><p>"Hi… uh, is this the School Idol Research Club?"</p><p>You stare at the girl, marvelling at how the hair floating around her head in zero-g makes her resemble an over-excited orange, then point carefully at the bulkhead above you, wondering if she's quite real. She glances up at the cheery "Uranohoshi School Idol Research Club" sign mounted on the bulkhead above the bay's built-in computer terminal and continues in a rush.</p><p>"I went to the Council to try to start a school idol club for me and my friend but they said we already had one so I couldn't and we should join it instead — I mean this one — and then I asked around and people said that the club room was here in the hanger and I— "</p><p>She runs out of breath in the middle of a sentence and hangs in the air in front of you, suddenly deflated. You'd find it almost cute if she weren't almost certainly completely clueless about what she's walking into, but she clearly has no idea and so it's time for you to show her what's what. You'd march right up into Nozomi's office and yell at her for sending her to waste both her time and yours if it weren't for the minor issue of anything involving Ms. High-and-Mighty reminding you of… things less important than the rapidly cooling second-year waiting for you to tear into her.</p><p>"And just what makes you think you're worthy to join the unparalleled Nico Yazawa's Uranohoshi School Idol Research Club, miss…?"</p><p>"…my name's Honoka Kosaka and I'm going to become an idol to save Uranohoshi!"</p><p>You're baffled. 'Save Uranohoshi'? From what? And where's her friend? She can't be too serious if she can't even be bothered to show up with orange-head here.</p><p>"Ok then, Ms. Kosaka. If you've really got what it takes to become a school idol, then surely you can answer a few basic questions."</p><p>You didn't spend all last week rewatching the first five Love Lives in their entirety not  to be ready with the first question before she's finished nodding her head. (It took a week because you watched all the bonus materials from the deluxe edition releases, down to   pre- and post-show interviews with the competitors, even if you <i>maybe</i> skipped one or two of the most boring — you pride yourself on understanding all things idol, including all the techniques that go into creating a compelling personal image, but you genuinely have no idea just what Izutsumi's appeal actually is.)</p><p>You decide to start her off with an easy one. "Which group won last year's Love Live?"</p><p>"A-RISE!" She's quick on the buzzer, you have to admit.</p><p>"Not bad. Ok, which Love Live introduced separate competitions for triplets and nonnets?"</p><p>"Um…"</p><p>She pauses, eyes darting between the tablets floating around you as if one of them might be hiding the answer. You start to think she might just be confused by the formal terminology, since about everyone who's not the organizers or unbearably pretentious (and if you ever find out who <b>ButaOshi_69</b> on the localnet idol forum is in real life you're absolutely going to kick their pompous ass all over the Uranohoshi) just calls them "threes" and "nines", but as the silence stretches on you realize that this might be the first time Kosaka's even heard about how the Love Live is organized. Was her first answer just a lucky guess? A-RISE, as the reigning champions, have been pulled into doing lots of public service CMs lately, you realize, so maybe she got their name from one of those?</p><p>Enough second-guessing yourself; time to move on. "What Love Live did this group…" — You reach into the whirl around you and toss a tablet at Kosaka.  "…win with an exquisite double-center arrangement?"</p><p>God help you, but Kosaka's nervousness is infectious and you can't stop yourself talking faster and faster over her stammering.</p><p>"Don't know that one either, huh? How about this?" You scan your eyes over the tablets and yank out one displaying the classic podium shot from the very first Love Live and shove it in her direction. She jerks her arm out to catch it and sends herself into a slow spin, flailing to compensate.</p><p>"Even an entry-level idol fan should at least know who this is."</p><p>She's been shrinking in on herself, but now she blazes back up.</p><p>"Maybe I don't know all these things you do about idols, Yazawa, but I don't see why that means I can't join the club. Why does this have to be a fight? School idols aren't solo; they're groups, so we should be working together to become the best school idol group we can be so that we can save Uranohoshi. Maybe I don't bring a lot to the table yet, but you know everything about idols, my friend Maki has a frame she says we can use if we join the club, and I'll do whatever it takes to become a true school idol if you'll just work with  us to learn how!</p><p>…and you'd had plenty of determination yourself when you jumped in to idoldom and where did that get you? You know there's no way she'll do any better than you did, not with how she's starting from knowing even less than you did way back when. You've got to stop her from going down this painful path now, for her sake.</p><p>"Look, you don't know the first thing about school idols, so I don't know what good training would even do for you and — wait, did you say you <i>have a frame</i>?"</p><p>How did a rando like her get access to a frame? You'd spent hours and hours dashing all over the station with Nozomi and Eli begging anyone and everyone with a frame just to scrounge together a few hours each a week in a cockpit to practice in for real, outside of the simulators. If only you'd had more time back then to drill the movements…</p><p>"It's not mine; it's Maki's. She's a great mechanic and she's gonna be a school idol, too!"</p><p>With reliable access to a frame, you think, the situation's suddenly looking far more promising. You can take the hapless wannabes and their frame and train them up exactly to your standards to build a new triplet that'll far exceed anything you could've done with those old two slackers.</p><p>You stretch the brightest smile you can across your face, shove a few wayward tablets out of the way, and offer her your hand.</p><p>"Congrats and welcome to the Uranohoshi School Idol Research Club, probationary idol Honoka Kosaka. Now, how about you introduce me to this Maki?"</p>
<hr/><p>
  <i>Two days and 0.07 AU later</i>
</p><p>You're strapping into the cockpit of Nishikino's frame (you still can't quite believe that it's outright hers, but that's the daughter of one of the big-shots in Medical for you) for your first lessons with the her and Kosaka when the nostalgia breaks over you like a wave. The endless days in the simulator, painstaking trial after painstaking error in moving in free space without smearing the frame against the station or slingshotting yourself into the deep void; precious hours of begged time in borrowed frames, struggling against unfamiliar g-forces and recalcitrant hardware; and the oppressive fog of constant arguments with your fellow idols laying over all those hours and days. If only you'd practiced harder, you wish for the millionth time. If only they'd taken the Love Live seriously, if only they'd practiced half as hard as you did as you worked yourself to the bone just to keep the three of you in the running, then maybe you wouldn't have gone into the competition half-zombified from stress and sleeplessness and—</p><p>"Hey, Yazawa. Are you doing ok in there? You were kind of staring into nothing for a minute there."</p><p>You look up, shaking your head to clear away the unpleasant memories clinging to you, and see Kosaka's face haloed by the round hatch of the frame. Nishikino's floating behind her, obviously struggling with the idea of you piloting her frame. She'd resisted the idea at first, but Kosaka'd pushed aside her objections with the same stupid whole-hearted determintation that'd bulled you over, and now here you are sitting in her frame zoning out.</p><p>"It's nothing," you lie. An idol is never anything less than perfectly composed.</p><p>"I'm just focusing like I'd do before any performance." Even if the only audience is your two mewling mentees, an idol never gives anything less than her all. They're yours now, and you *will* be the perfect idol in every regard, on and off the stage, to show them the way.</p><p>You've not piloted a frame since that fateful day, but you can feel the the knowledge flowing back up from your fingertips into your brain as your hands move themselves through the achingly familiar motions of the startup sequence.</p><p>The cockpit hatch spins closed, the launch bay purges atmosphere, the outer door swings open, the umbilicals detach with silent pops of flash-frozen vapor, and you're gently accelerating out into free space to begin the first performance of your new career. You grin, despite the nerves you'd deny to the last twisting your stomach. It's time to wow your new <s>underlings</s> trainees with the fluid grace of an idol's frame in motion.</p><p>You'll start off with a piroutte to the left, you think, mentally rehearsing the easy twist of the differential throttles.</p><p>"Watch carefully." A submonitor in the cockpit shows Nishikino and Kosaka's faces pressed eagerly against a porthole. "A brilliant idol like myself makes it look easy, but there's a lot that goes into even a basic move like this."</p><p>You remember just a moment too late that the EU-patterned controls of Nishikino's frame orient the control axes exactly opposite those of the SEA pattern frames you trained on as your hands drive the frame smoothly into a dizzying rightward tumble.</p><p>"Yazawa? Was that supposed to happen?"</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>You can take the fan out of the Homestuck, but you can't take the Homestuck out of the fan…</p><p>This fic came from a discussion w/ sceles and ubertastic about various idol shows that led into a comparison of AKB0048 and Love Live which then led into the idea of Love Live with mecha and now here we are!</p></blockquote></div></div>
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